jeremyrandall / blog /

Social networking

I like Facebook. I like the clean interface. I like the way you can post snarky little status updates. I like that all of my friends are showing up there, and I can read their snarky little status updates. I’m amused that some people never change; sometimes I find that disappointing too. I even kind of like all the weird applications and add-ons. They’re generally silly, but being able to spend a few seconds sending someone a virtual gift or hug, a comment or a link makes keeping in touch both amazingly easy and remarkably effective. It kind of goes in waves for me. Someone may see my status update and that causes them to send a message. We go back an forth a couple lines at a time, and feel re-connected, caught up. I’ve had old co-workers, friends from organizations, friends from high school and even friends from junior high and elementary school get back in touch.

“Jeremy is feeling enamored with a major social networking site.”

Changing attitudes about finite resources

I get the impression that people — regular people — are genuinely changing their attitudes about energy, gas, oil, finite resources. Around the blogosphere people are writing about different fuels, new energy technologies, wanting governments to seek alternatives to oil. People seem to be accepting that it costs actual money to drive a large vehicle down the road, that maybe that’s not the best thing to be doing, and that there are other options that make more sense environmentally and economically.

Walkable cities are healthy cities

I read in the newspaper today that San Francisco has been rated the most walkable city in the United States. Yes, even with the hills. Maybe especially with the hills. I was walking up the hill to my apartment the other day and, as I got to the top, I remembered how hard that hill was the first time I went to see the apartment, and noted how easy it is now. I’m a Billy Goat.

Is ‘blogoshpere’ a real word?

I’m sort of amazed by all the blogs. People are writing about so many things… some are interesting to me… some are not… some are cleaver, insightful, delightful… some are not. This blog is interesting… maybe not.

Muni, Muni, Muni

I like it when Muni employees show a sense of humor. I heard this on the PA system at Montgomery Station this morning:

“Muni custodian, Muni custodian. Your services are needed at Van Ness Station. We have an extremely serious situation at Van Ness that needs your attention. We have a coffee spill.”

I try to update this blog at least once a month, and sometimes it happens a couple times a month. That has been the right balance for me here and I like it that way.

I missed April.

I was trying to think of what to write all month. Another abstract descriptive story of cable cars and windy San Francisco nights? Generalized tales of the people in my life? Which servers and operating systems I’ve been playing with lately? Working hard at my job? The weather, which is always of interest to me?

Not sure. This entry is one of those exercises in simply writing for the sake of writing. And, of course, so this blog has been updated within about a month. Sans April. Just taking action for the sake of taking action is perfectly reasonable to me. In fact, it’s a great tool.

Life is rolling along, complete with new challenges and changes. I’ve been walking a surprisingly navigable line between confidence and fear, new and old, changes and comfort. Yes, there are extremes, but I believe today’s extremes become tomorrow’s day to day life, and I like that a lot. To me that is growth.

All here at home, my place in the world, with the fog rolling over the hills, the Muni trains running in the tunnels, the tasks on my to-list making me tired and the soundtrack playing in the background with the sub woofer dialed way down so as to not disturb the neighbors too much.

I met up with someone cool the other day who writes a couple of blogs. One is more professional and one is more personal. We talked a bit about posting life details in a public forum and the implications. I have written here before how the public/private blog balance is a challenge (perhaps I should just blog about that all the time). I like the idea of posting a lot of interesting things about myself (since I am so goddamn interesting, of course) but I know that striking a balance is important. I believe my caution is appropriate, yet I find myself envious of the people who do feel to write more about their lives. I guess my final take, though, is that I’d rather interact with people in real life who want to get to know me than to post everything on a blog and then exist only as a virtual being. Deep, huh?

On another note, I find it completely annoying when people do nothing but complain in their blogs. C’mon people, stop complaining and go do something to improve your lives! But I digress.

My love affair with San Francisco continues. I shared with someone the other day that I am “living my dream,” here, no matter how cliche that sounds. I am really grateful for that.

We’ve had some overly warm days, but once the wind picks up and the fog starts to roll in it cools down and is really pleasant, at least to me. I’ve been here long enough that I a sweatshirt serves as enough of a jacket to keep me comfortable even when it is in fact chilly.

I’ve been riding cable cars more often now that I get a FastPass routinely each month. Sometimes I will do a long walk toward the Embarcadero and take a cable car home, sometimes I just go for a ride because they’re there and they’re cool.

I was mugged a few months ago and since then I’ve stopped carrying a backpack. Which means I don’t routinely carry a camera with me anymore. I’m really missing taking pictures when I’m out and about. I think it may be time to get another backpack (too bad those “man purses” are so ridiculous) and get a new camera. Probably a good excuse anyway since it’s been a long time since I bought a digital camera and the quality is sure to be a lot higher. I’m planning to get a bunch of my existing photos up on Flickr soon and then start building the collection with new material.

Unfortunately the camera in my new-ish phone takes pictures of considerably worse quality than even my several-year-old digital camera. Some shots from the camera phone:

This Southbound cable car has just come up the steep hill from the Fisherman’s Wharf area; the curvy part of Lombard street drops off in the background with North Beach and the bay visible.

This Northbound cable car is about to drop down the steep hill to the Fisherman’s Wharf area.

The busy part of California Street facing West toward Polk Gulch.

I’m off to work shortly, after the holiday yesterday.

I’ve done a bit of rearranging of my web site. This blog is in the same location, but it’s no longer serving as the main page. That has been moved to the wiki, with appropriate redirects and auto-refreshes leading there. It occurs to me that this overall site has been in existence for quite awhile now; it’s like a house that I just keep adding new wings on to and changing where the front door is. Not to mention all of the rooms that are hidden away at the end of long hallways, and the stored files and trinkets from years ago neatly cataloged in the basement. Is the analogy making sense?

April was a busy, fun, active, scary and difficult month. I’ve been working quite a bit, ejoying many social activities and feeling vaguely guilty that I’ve barely been sailing this year. April includes an anniversary of a family member’s death, for which I take some time off and do something meaningful to mark the occasion and remember that person.

Geez, it’s already halfway through May. Wow.

So I have been TV-free since ~April 23rd. And I am, in fact, finding that that prompts me to go out and do more things in the evenings. I basically plan or find something to do each night after work. On nights when I do just come right home, I listen to music (I bought a ton of new music), read, clean my place, rearrange things and generally be more productive than I would be with a television. So it has all worked out the way I wanted it to. I did watch The Office at a friend’s house the other day; I do miss that show.

Losing TV is just part of an ongoing self-improvement tack. I gave up diet soda to reduce my sodium intake; since I’m not a coffee drinker, I went ahead and gave up caffeine as well. I didn’t realize just how much caffeine I had been taking in; the first three days without it I could barely stay awake. I was literally sitting in my cube at work trying not to nod off. Once I got past that, it has been fine. I’ve been drinking a lot more water and I can feel the difference.

There’s been a lot going on lately, but no one thing has inspired me to write a story here. I guess it’s just time passing that has prompted me to write here now, which, honestly, is a fine enough reason. I only post here about once or twice a month which is just enough to let my friends know that the site is still active and for me to pay attention to the hosting system. I know people who blog every detail of their lives and I know people who blog on certain topics of interest. It’s all interesting, but I find it hard to get a real sense of someone from a blog. In fact the ones I like the most are the blogs of people I actually know; then it’s an adjunct of a person that I know more intimately.

One of my friends summed up this whole idea when she told me, “your blog is bullshit since it doesn’t portray who you really are.”

I understand her sentiment, but for what it’s worth, I’ve made it a point to state that this site represents a minuscule part of who and what I really am. I’m a big fan these days of living in the real world, not in the virtual.

My life has been busy, filled with work and friends, a recent trip to Monterey, technical issues, thinking about the new sailing season, writing and overall growth. That’s a small glimpse of my life, to be sure, but it does portray a tiny bit of who and what I really am.

So I spent a good portion of this evening on MySpace. I added a few of my friends, and then kept looking around and found a bunch of other people that I know, and friends of friends, and old friends and people from other times and places in my life.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet, but I noticed that KQED did an hour about MySpace on March 3rd.

Update: The Forum segment was focused on how kids use MySpace and what parents need to know about it. Not my area of interest, but it was a good discussion that hit on some important topics.

I’d like to see if I can develop a better “voice” for this blog.

Lately I have been underwhelmed by the “safe” and “noncommittal” writing that I have been doing here. Don’t get me wrong, I really am a fan of exploring San Francisco Parks, but I feel very little passion when I write a magazine-like blurb about big trees and hiking trails.

If you read back far enough you’ll find some major time gaps and a lack of theme that goes back several years. The entries prior to 2006 were lifted from the journals and blogs I kept before this one; the deeply personal items did not make it to this public space.

I keep a private journal elsewhere, a traditional diary of sorts, which allows me to explore a lot of my thoughts and feelings while maintaining a sense of privacy. On this site it is a challenge for me to balance sharing too much about my day to day life versus writing in a way that shares virtually nothing of my real feelings and opinions. I tend to do the latter, which ends up being rather lifeless.

I would like to achieve a better balance.

Very few folks read here at the moment, but if anyone has comments, I’d love to hear them.

Someone I know created a “syndication feed” to my blog (this site) on LiveJournal. If you add the user “jrandallfeed” [Update: it’s now called “jrandallblog” — see below for details] to your LiveJournal friends list, you’ll see snippets from this site’s posts show up as you read your LiveJournal friends list. I think that is kind of cool for LiveJournal users who want to keep up with people who are blogging outside of that community.

I’m not particularly excited about the name “jrandallfeed” so I emailed LiveJournal and asked then to change it to “jrandallblog” since that is a bit more in line with how I have organized my site (I actually created a feed to my sailing blog called “jrandallsailing” along the same lines). They wrote back and said “no” with a link to their FAQ explaining that once a feed is created nobody owns it and they won’t delete it or modify it.

That got me thinking about how copyright issues apply to RSS feeds. Obviously, content I create belongs to me. But by providing an RSS feed of my content it is extremely easy for anyone to take it and manipulate it. A “default” RSS feed has no security policies or access restriction, so once content is made available there is nothing, at least in a technical sense, to stop it from being used in any way.

So how is copyright actually applied in the give and take realm of RSS feeds?

When listening to copyrighted music on the web or reading a copyrighted static web page for that matter, I don’t assume I can take the content and incorporate it in to my own work just because it was accessible. Is it assumed that content obtained via RSS can be used or presented in any way, with no guidelines from the owner of that content? What are the legal implications?

I took a peek at my XML to see if I am providing a copyright tag in the feed, and I am not. It looks like I can add a plugin to WordPress that will add some copyright verbage to the posts.

As for LiveJournal, perhaps they should provide some level of control to content owners when their feeds are aggregated through LiveJournal syndication? Or, again, is it just assumed that providing content via RSS removes the owner’s right to control any aspect of its distribution?

Update: The LiveJournal folks manually broke “jrandallfeed” in order to let me create a new syndication link called “jrandallblog” — I appreciate that. It’s a messy solution, but I suspect they’ll clean such things up over time as they refine how they handle their syndication system.